Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  Chip felt bad for both of them, plain to see, and I felt restless, so in solidarity we followed them, filing toward the door. I figured the Mormonish woman wasn’t going to say much anyway. There was no point to her. At least from our POV, the woman had no reason for being. Sheerly from an outside perspective. I’ve noticed that can happen pretty easily: you look at a person from just about every side there is—except for from the inside, obviously—and there just doesn’t seem to be a good reason for them.

  It’s frowned upon to say so, but if we’re being honest, come on—please. There are currently billions of humans. Even allowing for some repetition, are there billions of reasons for being?

  “Before you go, though, would you sign in? Please? We really need to get everyone’s full contact info, emails, cell phone—”

  She was cut off as we retreated.

  OUTSIDE THE DOME, the golf cart wasn’t there. Those massive red flowers bulged under the building’s outdoor lights; our fairy-tale coach had turned into a butternut squash.

  “Jesus!” shrilled Janeane, and stood still. “Now we’re supposed to walk? Across the whole grounds in the dark?”

  Steve talked her down, holding her wrists gently.

  “We’re perfectly secure,” he said. “Take a deep breath. In, out. That’s it. Good. In, out. In, out. You, are, safe, here. Now breathe again. Pranayama.”

  “We can go back and ask the name-tag chick,” said Chip. “Or, hey, I’ll just run up and get a cart. You guys wait here, I’ll go get it. I need the exercise. It’s no problem.”

  “No! No! We can’t split up!” cried Janeane, interrupting her breathing. “Disemboweling!”

  “Sorry, she means that’s what’ll happen next,” explained Steve over her shoulder, still holding and patting her. “Like in the slasher movies.”

  “OK, listen, I’ll call up to the front desk, then,” said Chip. “They’ll send a driver down, I’m sure. It’s no big deal.”

  Chip’s a master of smartphone usage; he’d set up a Listserv for the dive group, which he used to communicate with everyone. He’d been messaging the Bay Areans, the foot fetishist, the divers and spearfishers all day.

  Once he’d made the call, while we were waiting for the golf cart, the two of us left Steve to work his Freudian/yoga magic. We stepped back from the others, under the overhang of a big old tree with feathery leaves.

  “Maybe she watched too many of those slasher movies,” said Chip quietly. “Maybe she saw it happen one too many times—where everyone gets picked off one by one.”

  Hatcheted, I thought, and then de-limbed. Their arms and legs tossed here and there like rice after a wedding.

  “I was thinking this was a single-murder scenario,” I said to him. “Hoping, at least. And then they solve it. But—you really think it might be more of a slasher deal?”

  Chip cocked his head, considering.

  “Wait! Think before you answer, Chip. It just occurred to me: if it turns out this is a slasher movie, and we act all dismissive—if for example you look too smug right now and shrug your shoulders, disdainful and smirking—then for certain we’ll be the next to turn up all murdered.”

  “OK. So, for the record, I’m considering carefully. No one’s dismissing the slasher possibility out of hand,” said Chip. He looked around respectfully, reassuring the hidden camera. “But, having considered, I think it’s fairly unlikely, on balance. It’s not really a slasher format. Because Nancy, Nancy was great, I mean—”

  He looked a little choked up for a second so I drew near and laid my cheek against his chest.

  “—Nancy, man. I still can’t—believe …”

  We stood there in silence till Chip felt able to speak again. A few feet away Steve and Janeane were not dissimilarly clenched. Among the squash-sized flowers the four of us made up two couple-units, each standing close.

  “What I was saying,” he said after a minute. “So. The slashers usually start with a beautiful, slutty woman getting the ax. Or cleaver. Butcher’s knife. Sword. Stiletto. Anyway, blade. There has to be a slice, a gouge, or a full-on carving. Often the sacrificial non-virgin is wearing white, right? She’s really young, too, maybe a teenager even. That isn’t anything like Nancy.”

  I thought of the eyebrows and I agreed; if this was a slasher movie, it was the weakest possible knockoff. Like a Mickey Mouse doll fashioned of dirty straw in someplace like Guangdong.

  The box office would be a bust.

  “I hope you’re right,” I said.

  We heard the whir of a golf cart and shuffled out of the shadows to greet it.

  THE NEXT TIME we saw Riley was at breakfast.

  Only he wasn’t Riley, or not exactly the Riley with whom we’d briefly had an acquaintance. He was the “after” photo in a before-and-after pair. He carried himself with more of a swagger; his hair seemed blonder. That he was actually blonder seemed pretty unlikely—a dye job performed so quickly and out of the blue—yet it was true: he seemed blonder. Even Chip noticed it.

  More to the point, he’d turned against us. That’s the best way I can put it.

  When Chip saw him and dashed over to his table we’d been loading up at the buffet, so Chip was hefting a huge plate of waffles, strawberries and whipped cream, scrambled-egg mounds, bacon, and green and orange melon balls that threatened to fall off and roll willy-nilly. Chip, with his happy, golden-retriever attitude, waxed joyful that Riley was in one piece, holding his heaping plate awkwardly all the while as he stood at Riley’s solo table with the videographer looking up at him impatiently.

  But instead of thanking Chip for his concern, Riley brushed off Chip’s worry like it was girlish. He came off superior and breezy, with a grin from shampoo commercials.

  I was standing a few feet away, holding a table open for Chip and me in the busy all-you-can-eat buffet scenario, so I didn’t hear all that Riley said. I just saw what I saw.

  “Huh,” said Chip, coming over to me and sitting down.

  His golden-retriever light was dimmed.

  “That guy’s kind of douchey,” I said. “Isn’t he.”

  “He said that Nancy drowned and I should just get over it,” said Chip, staring down at his cooling plate of buffet bounty.

  I waited a second until I was sure: Chip had a tear in his eye—one at least, possibly two. I took his hand. “You know what, Chip?” I asked gently. “Someone just bought him off. That’s what it is.”

  Chip met my eyes, touched his teary one with the back of a hand, then said gruffly, “Bought him—?”

  “I’m in the business world, remember? I hear when money talks. Yesterday he was average or below, finance-wise—in terms of people who can afford to take Caribbean vacations in the first place, that is. But today he’s coasting. Today he feels rich. I can tell by looking at him.”

  “His hair does seem yellower,” Chip mused, slowly returning to his baseline mood.

  “And how come he’s here? He’s not a hotel guest.”

  “He said he’s taking a meeting.”

  Riley got up and strolled out then, leaving only a coffee cup behind. Wherever he was taking a meeting, it wasn’t in the buffet zone.

  WE WENT DOWN to the shore later to forget our troubles, swim and snorkel off some buffet calories; Steve came with us, dressed in a cruel Speedo. We saw it when he shucked his oversize Pink Freud T-shirt. Janeane was recuperating in their cabana: she was much better, he said, he’d dosed her with sedatives the night before and at sunrise they’d done yoga and meditation.

  It was while we were stretched out on some cotton-padded lounge chairs between snorkels—Chip scrolling and tapping, Steve touching his toes and grunting, me reading a dog-eared paperback from the resort’s library of exuberantly stupid books—that I noticed the crowds. Down the beach at the marina, out on the docks, there was a flurry of activity. There were more boats than usual; there was more movement.

  “Huh,” said Chip, frowning down at his phone. “People are unsubscribing from my list! T
he fishermen, the guy with the foot fetish, a bunch of them … they’re leaving the Listserv, sending me messages saying they want to be taken off. It was down to eleven when we got up. And now it’s down to six!”

  I studied Chip’s bemused face; I swiveled and studied the scene at the marina, its far-off hustle and bustle.

  “Let’s take a walk,” I said. “I need to stretch my legs. Shut off your phone for fifteen minutes, Chip, won’t you? Try to relax. Think of this as our honeymoon.”

  We ambled along the sand toward the marina, me acting casual and leisurely on purpose, Chip trying to pretend he wasn’t hurt by the defection of his Listserv and speculating, to distract himself from those feelings, about Nancy’s family and what they had or had not been told. Steve, a relentless exerciser whose physique completely, utterly failed to reflect this apparent fitness obsession, was executing, as we walked, some arm-and-chest movements that resembled a slow chicken dance.

  “We have to keep after the resort management,” said Chip. “At any time there could be brand-new information.”

  “Mmm,” said Steve noncommittally.

  “Mmm what?” asked Chip.

  A pelican flapped slowly along the shore beside us and I felt a stir of fondness for the foolish-looking yet steadily graceful creature. I thought about how it must be inside the pelican’s throat pouch, the stench of bile and rotting fish. Nameless debris.

  Steve and the pelican, each with their own flapping, made a nice parallel/contrast.

  “I’m just not sure we’ll be told more than we know now,” said Steve. “That’s my feeling.”

  “But that’s not right,” said Chip, agitated. “You know it isn’t. This isn’t right, none of it is. It’s like no one else cares. And someone’s dead who shouldn’t be! A good person, a person who has tenure at a major U.S. university!”

  “Believe me, I agree,” said Steve.

  “Deb,” said Chip, turning to me. “Please, honey. Can’t we call someone and give them a bunch of money to solve this? Aren’t there police you can just hire? Who figure out the crime and catch the bad guys? And make sure justice is done?”

  “They call them private detectives,” I said. “I don’t think they handle the justice part, though.”

  “I didn’t know if those existed anymore,” said Chip. “I thought maybe they went out with black-and-white movies, or maybe when Columbo died.”

  Steve nodded sympathetically, did some neck rolls.

  “I’m serious, Deb,” said Chip. “We can’t just let this go.”

  I nodded too, wondering why the hard-boiled sleuth of the 1940s and ’50s had morphed into crime procedurals. People didn’t believe in a lone sleuth these days; they didn’t believe one man could solve a crime. Or one woman, either. Miss Marple was a joke, same with the Murder, She Wrote lady.

  Deductive reasoning? Get the fuck out, was what Americans said to the obsolete sleuths of yesteryear. Even in the heyday of sleuthing, American detectives relied mainly on guns, not brains like the unmanly English. (I’d hardly thought of Gina since the mermaids, I realized then, Gina and Ellis in their love nest of Union Jacks and irony.) The gun is mightier than the pen, was our true opinion, and the RPG is mightier still.

  Gina had discussed this subject with me too; Gina used me as a sounding board now and then. She said she liked to talk about her work to people outside the academy, people who weren’t constantly baffled about how she got tenure in the first place.

  The sleuths who went solo, looking cool, smoking cigarettes, etc., had been replaced by highly efficient teams of police officers with integrity, brilliant forensics specialists, earnest lawyers, and superefficient computers. It doesn’t matter to the TV-watching public that in real life America has basically none of the above, Gina says, due to the fact that we stoutly refuse to cough up taxes to pay for it. Gina studies what she calls the formulas/standard deviations of TV, along with junk food and pop song lyrics. On our TVs, she says, we like to see the governmental institutions functioning perfectly. People don’t want a lone man armed with nothing but a snarky wit and a lame analog peashooter. They just can’t take that seriously.

  That was my train of thought, walking along the beach in the British Virgin Islands while only partly attending to Chip’s worries over memorial-service protocol.

  “… want to send something ourselves, maybe a flower arrangement? Or maybe a donation to a charity?” he was saying as we came up to the marina, where the dock’s pilings, in front of us, stretched barnacle-encrusted above the lacework of the tide.

  “Whoa,” said Steve, finally noticing the traffic. “I don’t like this. I don’t like being so close to boats.”

  “What the—? What’s going on up there?” asked Chip.

  I’d been walking a few steps ahead of them, and now I turned around. I was wearing a creamy sarong over my bikini, albeit a flowing sarong with pouchy pockets for my cell phone and room-key card, strands of my shining hair floating around my face and neck in the ocean breeze. I like to think I looked attractive at that particular moment—as well as authoritative and trustworthy.

  To Chip, anyway. Along with being a universal ear, a spouse is a universal eye. A spouse is watching your biopic at all times, much as you’re watching theirs. And even if you don’t admit it you want both those biopics to be well filmed, in warm, nostalgic colors. Plus heart-achingly scored.

  “I think you know what it is, Chip,” I said gently.

  CHIP TOOK IT hard. I’d known he would, I’d feared he would take it hard and I was right: he did.

  We got up on top of the docks, though Steve stayed down below. He didn’t do ship, boats, anything seafaring, he said, a matter of personal policy. Chip and I found ourselves among the slips, among the boats, within the throng rushing to and fro and readying vessels for excursions. Small boats but mostly larger boats, soaring white yachts you might almost feel comfortable calling ships—all manner of watergoing vehicle was being fitted out. Gorda’s the yachtiest of the Virgin Islands: yacht people swarm daily off their boats into the restaurants, onto the beaches, looking for terra firma and their share of landlubber food and sport. This was one of several marinas on the island, and it was white with yachts.

  Also there was an overwhelming vibe of haste, mission, even urgency: a vital enterprise under way. We couldn’t get an answer out of anyone because they were ignoring us, in their furor and commotion. They wouldn’t stop to explain; they didn’t even look at us in passing. We moved among them like shadows or ghosts.

  Presently, as we stood there being buffeted by hurrying people—a little dazzled, a little lost, now and then jostled by a passing workatron—Chip located someone from our dive group and grabbed his shoulder, stopped him mid-rush. It was a recent Listserv defector I hadn’t ever paid attention to, a thin guy with bulging eyes.

  “They’re paying time and a half,” he told us, sweating from the exertion of hefting a sack. It wavered on his shoulder. “Plus open bar tonight.”

  “What for? What’s going on?” urged Chip.

  “We have to cordon off the area, these boats here are kind of the support system for those other ships we’re using, these big ships with fishing nets—trawlers, I think that’s what they are. Or maybe it’s purse seine. They’re going to drop the nets around where the marvels are so that they can’t escape,” said the guy.

  “The marvels?” said Chip.

  “The marvels, you know, the attraction. The fish people,” said the guy, and then he got a stressed look on his face, glancing past us at someone, I guess, who needed either his sack or his presence. He quickly turned to leave. “Gotta bounce.”

  Chip looked at me, stricken.

  “They’re going after them,” he said.

  I saw a face I recognized, then, up on the deck of one of the nearer yachts: Mike Jans or Chance or whatever, the too-tanned resort employee from Guest Services who’d come to the door of Steve and Janeane’s cabana. He wasn’t wearing his maroon tie anymore; now he was cla
d in what I guessed was modern sailor gear, a windbreaker and a cap, a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Approaching him from the gangplank—another face I recognized!—was our other Guest Services rep, the name-tag woman who’d been Mormonish the night before.

  Well, in daylight she wasn’t Mormonish at all. She wore flip-flops and shorts, and her bare legs were strong and muscular as a carthorse’s, plus clearly waxed. I’m not sure, but I don’t think waxing’s much of a Latter-Day Saints habit. She’s not a Mormon, I couldn’t help thinking a little disappointedly; I couldn’t help feeling just the tiniest bit betrayed. Sure, she’d never directly claimed to be LDS, but the ankle-length, floral, asexual dress had made the claim for her, and now she was renouncing it without so much as a by-your-leave. It came to me then that dressing badly could be seen, in a way, as a form of disinformation, a form, almost, of psychological weapon.

  But I didn’t have time to go down that road. Chip was upset.

  “Deb,” he said quietly, standing close to me. His hands were actually trembling. “They’re going out there to hunt them, is that it? Hunt the mermaids?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “I really don’t think that’s it.”

  “Then what is it?”

  I pointed at a banner flapping behind Mike and his coworker. And that was our introduction to the new mermaid tourism company—incorporated, as it turned out, with mysterious rapidity as a wholly owned subsidiary of the multinational chain that also owned our resort—that called itself the Venture of Marvels.

  Beside the words, a logo of a fishtail sticking out of a frothy, stylized wave.

  “They’re going out there to market them,” I said.

  THERE’S NOT A lot of anger in Chip, really; I’d say he’s well below average on the anger meter, for his demographic. He’s white, he’s male, and he’s quite young, but he’s got no serial killer in him—none at all. No tendencies to violence that I’ve ever seen. Or if he does have them they channel completely into the gaming, sex, and athletics.